Zhibin Li

Milad Ramezani, Liang Wang, Joshua Knights et al.

This paper proposes a pose-graph attentional graph neural network, called P-GAT, which compares (key)nodes between sequential and non-sequential sub-graphs for place recognition tasks as opposed to a common frame-to-frame retrieval problem formulation currently implemented in SOTA place recognition methods. P-GAT uses the maximum spatial and temporal information between neighbour cloud descriptors -- generated by an existing encoder -- utilising the concept of pose-graph SLAM. Leveraging intra- and inter-attention and graph neural network, P-GAT relates point clouds captured in nearby locations in Euclidean space and their embeddings in feature space. Experimental results on the large-scale publically available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in scenes lacking distinct features and when training and testing environments have different distributions (domain adaptation). Further, an exhaustive comparison with the state-of-the-art shows improvements in performance gains. Code is available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/P-GAT.

Zhibin Li, Piotr Koniusz, Lu Zhang et al.

Traditional approaches for learning on categorical data underexploit the dependencies between columns (\aka fields) in a dataset because they rely on the embedding of data points driven alone by the classification/regression loss. In contrast, we propose a novel method for learning on categorical data with the goal of exploiting dependencies between fields. Instead of modelling statistics of features globally (i.e., by the covariance matrix of features), we learn a global field dependency matrix that captures dependencies between fields and then we refine the global field dependency matrix at the instance-wise level with different weights (so-called local dependency modelling) w.r.t. each field to improve the modelling of the field dependencies. Our algorithm exploits the meta-learning paradigm, i.e., the dependency matrices are refined in the inner loop of the meta-learning algorithm without the use of labels, whereas the outer loop intertwines the updates of the embedding matrix (the matrix performing projection) and global dependency matrix in a supervised fashion (with the use of labels). Our method is simple yet it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on six popular dataset benchmarks. Detailed ablation studies provide additional insights into our method.

Ruyi Feng, Zhibin Li, Bowen Liu et al.

Understanding trajectory diversity is a fundamental aspect of addressing practical traffic tasks. However, capturing the diversity of trajectories presents challenges, particularly with traditional machine learning and recurrent neural networks due to the requirement of large-scale parameters. The emerging Transformer technology, renowned for its parallel computation capabilities enabling the utilization of models with hundreds of millions of parameters, offers a promising solution. In this study, we apply the Transformer architecture to traffic tasks, aiming to learn the diversity of trajectories within vehicle populations. We analyze the Transformer's attention mechanism and its adaptability to the goals of traffic tasks, and subsequently, design specific pre-training tasks. To achieve this, we create a data structure tailored to the attention mechanism and introduce a set of noises that correspond to spatio-temporal demands, which are incorporated into the structured data during the pre-training process. The designed pre-training model demonstrates excellent performance in capturing the spatial distribution of the vehicle population, with no instances of vehicle overlap and an RMSE of 0.6059 when compared to the ground truth values. In the context of time series prediction, approximately 95% of the predicted trajectories' speeds closely align with the true speeds, within a deviation of 7.5144m/s. Furthermore, in the stability test, the model exhibits robustness by continuously predicting a time series ten times longer than the input sequence, delivering smooth trajectories and showcasing diverse driving behaviors. The pre-trained model also provides a good basis for downstream fine-tuning tasks. The number of parameters of our model is over 50 million.

Litao Yu, Zhibin Li, Jian Zhang et al.

Scene segmentation in images is a fundamental yet challenging problem in visual content understanding, which is to learn a model to assign every image pixel to a categorical label. One of the challenges for this learning task is to consider the spatial and semantic relationships to obtain descriptive feature representations, so learning the feature maps from multiple scales is a common practice in scene segmentation. In this paper, we explore the effective use of self-attention within multi-scale image windows to learn descriptive visual features, then propose three different strategies to aggregate these feature maps to decode the feature representation for dense prediction. Our design is based on the recently proposed Swin Transformer models, which totally discards convolution operations. With the simple yet effective multi-scale feature learning and aggregation, our models achieve very promising performance on four public scene segmentation datasets, PASCAL VOC2012, COCO-Stuff 10K, ADE20K and Cityscapes.

Ziwang Fu, Feng Liu, Hanyang Wang et al.

The audio-video based multimodal emotion recognition has attracted a lot of attention due to its robust performance. Most of the existing methods focus on proposing different cross-modal fusion strategies. However, these strategies introduce redundancy in the features of different modalities without fully considering the complementary properties between modal information, and these approaches do not guarantee the non-loss of original semantic information during intra- and inter-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal fusion network based on self-attention and residual structure (CFN-SR) for multimodal emotion recognition. Firstly, we perform representation learning for audio and video modalities to obtain the semantic features of the two modalities by efficient ResNeXt and 1D CNN, respectively. Secondly, we feed the features of the two modalities into the cross-modal blocks separately to ensure efficient complementarity and completeness of information through the self-attention mechanism and residual structure. Finally, we obtain the output of emotions by splicing the obtained fused representation with the original representation. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on the RAVDESS dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed CFN-SR achieves the state-of-the-art and obtains 75.76% accuracy with 26.30M parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/skeletonNN/CFN-SR.

Zhibin Li, Jian Zhang, Yongshun Gong et al.

We propose a new method for learning with multi-field categorical data. Multi-field categorical data are usually collected over many heterogeneous groups. These groups can reflect in the categories under a field. The existing methods try to learn a universal model that fits all data, which is challenging and inevitably results in learning a complex model. In contrast, we propose a field-wise learning method leveraging the natural structure of data to learn simple yet efficient one-to-one field-focused models with appropriate constraints. In doing this, the models can be fitted to each category and thus can better capture the underlying differences in data. We present a model that utilizes linear models with variance and low-rank constraints, to help it generalize better and reduce the number of parameters. The model is also interpretable in a field-wise manner. As the dimensionality of multi-field categorical data can be very high, the models applied to such data are mostly over-parameterized. Our theoretical analysis can potentially explain the effect of over-parametrization on the generalization of our model. It also supports the variance constraints in the learning objective. The experiment results on two large-scale datasets show the superior performance of our model, the trend of the generalization error bound, and the interpretability of learning outcomes. Our code is available at https://github.com/lzb5600/Field-wise-Learning.

Georgios Tziafas, Yucheng Xu, Zhibin Li et al.

Grounding natural language to the physical world is a ubiquitous topic with a wide range of applications in computer vision and robotics. Recently, 2D vision-language models such as CLIP have been widely popularized, due to their impressive capabilities for open-vocabulary grounding in 2D images. Recent works aim to elevate 2D CLIP features to 3D via feature distillation, but either learn neural fields that are scene-specific and hence lack generalization, or focus on indoor room scan data that require access to multiple camera views, which is not practical in robot manipulation scenarios. Additionally, related methods typically fuse features at pixel-level and assume that all camera views are equally informative. In this work, we show that this approach leads to sub-optimal 3D features, both in terms of grounding accuracy, as well as segmentation crispness. To alleviate this, we propose a multi-view feature fusion strategy that employs object-centric priors to eliminate uninformative views based on semantic information, and fuse features at object-level via instance segmentation masks. To distill our object-centric 3D features, we generate a large-scale synthetic multi-view dataset of cluttered tabletop scenes, spawning 15k scenes from over 3300 unique object instances, which we make publicly available. We show that our method reconstructs 3D CLIP features with improved grounding capacity and spatial consistency, while doing so from single-view RGB-D, thus departing from the assumption of multiple camera views at test time. Finally, we show that our approach can generalize to novel tabletop domains and be re-purposed for 3D instance segmentation without fine-tuning, and demonstrate its utility for language-guided robotic grasping in clutter.

Litao Yu, Zhibin Li, Min Xu et al.

The Jaccard index, also known as Intersection-over-Union (IoU), is one of the most critical evaluation metrics in image semantic segmentation. However, direct optimization of IoU score is very difficult because the learning objective is neither differentiable nor decomposable. Although some algorithms have been proposed to optimize its surrogates, there is no guarantee provided for the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a margin calibration method, which can be directly used as a learning objective, for an improved generalization of IoU over the data-distribution, underpinned by a rigid lower bound. This scheme theoretically ensures a better segmentation performance in terms of IoU score. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed margin calibration method on seven image datasets, showing substantial improvements in IoU score over other learning objectives using deep segmentation models.

Feng Liu, HanYang Wang, Jiahao Zhang et al.

The image synthesis technique is relatively well established which can generate facial images that are indistinguishable even by human beings. However, all of these approaches uses gradients to condition the output, resulting in the outputting the same image with the same input. Also, they can only generate images with basic expression or mimic an expression instead of generating compound expression. In real life, however, human expressions are of great diversity and complexity. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm (EA) assisted GAN, named EvoGAN, to generate various compound expressions with any accurate target compound expression. EvoGAN uses an EA to search target results in the data distribution learned by GAN. Specifically, we use the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as the encoding of an EA and use a pre-trained GAN to generate human facial images, and then use a pre-trained classifier to recognize the expression composition of the synthesized images as the fitness function to guide the search of the EA. Combined random searching algorithm, various images with the target expression can be easily sythesized. Quantitative and Qualitative results are presented on several compound expressions, and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and the potential of EvoGAN.

Zhibin Li, Litao Yu, Jian Zhang

The Jaccard index, also known as Intersection-over-Union (IoU score), is one of the most critical evaluation metrics in medical image segmentation. However, directly optimizing the mean IoU (mIoU) score over multiple objective classes is an open problem. Although some algorithms have been proposed to optimize its surrogates, there is no guarantee provided for their generalization ability. In this paper, we present a novel data-distribution-aware margin calibration method for a better generalization of the mIoU over the whole data-distribution, underpinned by a rigid lower bound. This scheme ensures a better segmentation performance in terms of IoU scores in practice. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed margin calibration method on two medical image segmentation datasets, showing substantial improvements of IoU scores over other learning schemes using deep segmentation models.

Lu Zhang, Jian Zhang, Zhibin Li et al.

Inspired by the fact that spreading and collecting information through the Internet becomes the norm, more and more people choose to post for-profit contents (images and texts) in social networks. Due to the difficulty of network censors, malicious marketing may be capable of harming society. Therefore, it is meaningful to detect marketing intentions online automatically. However, gaps between multimodal data make it difficult to fuse images and texts for content marketing detection. To this end, this paper proposes Two-Branch Collaborative Graph Neural Networks to collaboratively represent multimodal data by Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior graph classification performance for marketing intention detection.

Wenbin Hu, Chuanyu Yang, Kai Yuan et al.

The ability to adapt to uncertainties, recover from failures, and coordinate between hand and fingers are essential sensorimotor skills for fully autonomous robotic grasping. In this paper, we aim to study a unified feedback control policy for generating the finger actions and the motion of hand to accomplish seamlessly coordinated tasks of reaching, grasping and re-grasping. We proposed a set of quantified metrics for task-orientated rewards to guide the policy exploration, and we analyzed and demonstrated the effectiveness of each reward term. To acquire a robust re-grasping motion, we deployed different initial states in training to experience failures that the robot would encounter during grasping due to inaccurate perception or disturbances. The performance of learned policy is evaluated on three different tasks: grasping a static target, grasping a dynamic target, and re-grasping. The quality of learned grasping policy was evaluated based on success rates in different scenarios and the recovery time from failures. The results indicate that the learned policy is able to achieve stable grasps of a static or moving object. Moreover, the policy can adapt to new environmental changes on the fly and execute collision-free re-grasp after a failed attempt within a short recovery time even in difficult configurations.

Yongshun Gong, Zhibin Li, Jian Zhang et al.

Recently, practical applications for passenger flow prediction have brought many benefits to urban transportation development. With the development of urbanization, a real-world demand from transportation managers is to construct a new metro station in one city area that never planned before. Authorities are interested in the picture of the future volume of commuters before constructing a new station, and estimate how would it affect other areas. In this paper, this specific problem is termed as potential passenger flow (PPF) prediction, which is a novel and important study connected with urban computing and intelligent transportation systems. For example, an accurate PPF predictor can provide invaluable knowledge to designers, such as the advice of station scales and influences on other areas, etc. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view localized correlation learning method. The core idea of our strategy is to learn the passenger flow correlations between the target areas and their localized areas with adaptive-weight. To improve the prediction accuracy, other domain knowledge is involved via a multi-view learning process. We conduct intensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method with real-world official transportation datasets. The results demonstrate that our method can achieve excellent performance compared with other available baselines. Besides, our method can provide an effective solution to the cold-start problem in the recommender system as well, which proved by its outperformed experimental results.

Zhibin Li, Jian Zhang, Qiang Wu et al.

Railway points are among the key components of railway infrastructure. As a part of signal equipment, points control the routes of trains at railway junctions, having a significant impact on the reliability, capacity, and punctuality of rail transport. Traditionally, maintenance of points is based on a fixed time interval or raised after the equipment failures. Instead, it would be of great value if we could forecast points' failures and take action beforehand, minimising any negative effect. To date, most of the existing prediction methods are either lab-based or relying on specially installed sensors which makes them infeasible for large-scale implementation. Besides, they often use data from only one source. We, therefore, explore a new way that integrates multi-source data which are ready to hand to fulfil this task. We conducted our case study based on Sydney Trains rail network which is an extensive network of passenger and freight railways. Unfortunately, the real-world data are usually incomplete due to various reasons, e.g., faults in the database, operational errors or transmission faults. Besides, railway points differ in their locations, types and some other properties, which means it is hard to use a unified model to predict their failures. Aiming at this challenging task, we firstly constructed a dataset from multiple sources and selected key features with the help of domain experts. In this paper, we formulate our prediction task as a multiple kernel learning problem with missing kernels. We present a robust multiple kernel learning algorithm for predicting points failures. Our model takes into account the missing pattern of data as well as the inherent variance on different sets of railway points. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm compared with other state-of-the-art methods.